Live from Lviv
I have never travelled to a country at war before and for that I am grateful. This short visit by train from Warsaw to Lviv, changing trains at Rava Ruska, was different. Krystyna and I went voluntarily as part of my research into the life of the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam who was born in there in 1909. It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire then and called Lemberg. For centuries prior to that, it was Lwów and part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Ulam was ten when Lemberg was returned to Poland and its name reverted to Lwów. After World War II, Stalin, with the tacit consent of the Allied powers, moved the borders of Poland to the west and Lwów became Lviv, Ukraine, which became part of the USSR. Got that? Pretty much the entire modern history of Eastern or is it Central Europe, contained in the history of this city. Throughout it all, Lviv remained primarily Polish, with a large Jewish population and a smaller Ukrainian one along with several other minority groups. It was a very multicultural city.
Today Ukraine is at war with Russia, but during our visit to Lviv this summer, it was hard at first to tell. We were not sure what to expect, perhaps bomb shelters, sandbags, a military or police presence, a curfew, but we saw none of those things, save for a single SHELTER sign in English at the train station. Maybe we didn’t look hard enough, or maybe there was a deliberate effort to maintain normalcy. In any case, we never felt anything but safe.
We were pleasantly surprised to discover that we could stay in a hotel right above the famous Scottish Café (Kawiarnia Szkocka), where Ulam, Stefan Banach, Hugo Steinhaus and other mathematical geniuses from the Lwów School of Mathematics and beyond, spent hours solving complex equations written on the café's marble tabletops. Eventually Banach's wise wife bought them a big notebook to preserve the equations from the waiters who scrubbed them off every night. The notebook miraculously survived the war, was translated into English by Ulam, and came to be known as The Scottish Book. We liked eating breakfast and dinner in the café under the photos of famous mathematicians. On the outside of the hotel we noticed an EU plaque commemorating the Lwów School and the ground-breaking work done there over coffee and beer. These markers showed that this bit of history mattered to both the city of Lviv and the European Union.
I didn't really expect to be moved to walk the same streets Stan Ulam walked, to see where he lived and studied but I was. I can't explain it, other than to say that it made him seem more real, more human, merely seeing the same buildings and pounding the same cobble stones he did every day. Surrounded by all this history, the war rarely entered our minds, but no doubt it was in the minds of the people we passed on the street or talked to in the shops. How could we speculate on these people's lives after such a short visit? We could only guess that people wanted to live their lives as best they could under the circumstances.
The neighborhood was beautiful, if somewhat touristy, but also looked very affluent; we saw many luxury cars, luxury jewelry and shoe stores, well-dressed people strolling. It must have been so when these Fin de Siècle and Art Nouveau buildings were built and it remains so today. Yet before long, even in this neighborhood, we came across reminders of war, such as the large emergency generators blocking the sidewalk in front of many buildings, including the McDonald's and the famous George Hotel, whose guests included Balzac, Maurice Ravel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Leonid Brezhnev, and Josef Pilsudski, pointing to the long-standing cosmopolitan nature of the city.
The Polish heritage remains, not only in the grand statue of Adam Mickiewicz currently under renovation, but also in some Polish street names written in both Cyrillic and Roman letters, including Ulam's Kosciuszko Street! Was that some sort of foreshadowing of Ulam's life journey? To live on a street named after a Polish patriot who also fought in the American War of Independence? Ulam would later "fight" for the U.S. as part of the Manhattan Project and design the hydrogen bomb.
On Lviv streets it was striking to see so many people dressed more formally than in Poland (and much less the U.S.), including many women wobbling along the cobble-stoned sidewalks in very high-heeled shoes. And a few walking barefoot with broken heels in hand toward shoe repair shops! Was this women's fashion statement another attempt to keep the war at arm’s length in order to preserve a certain ideal of a normal life? Again, we can only guess.
Ulam's old home, also in an elegant and expensive neighborhood, befitting his father's status as a prominent lawyer, was a short walk to Ivano Franko Park (formerly Kosciuszko Park) where families and couples came to cool off under the shade trees. We got a little lost searching for the Lviv Polytechnic University, passing large, old apartment buildings in poor repair, perhaps partially abandoned. This must have once been a very desirable location just across from the park and no doubt will be again, once the war ends.
The Polytechnic's main building was grandly, ornately old-fashioned, surrounded by a green space with many benches for the students to nap on between classes. There were few students, but the doors were open and the lobby was dark and cool. As we rested a bit, our eyes were drawn to a large display of small photographs, almost 200 of them, with flowers and candles displayed on the floor in front. The mostly young people, some in camouflage uniforms, smiled at us. Here was a very sad sign of war, of death, and the sacrifice of youth. It did not seem right to photograph the memorial.
Our last day in Lviv was a Sunday. At nine o'clock sharp an announcement came over the loudspeakers on the street outside our hotel window. My first thought was: a missile attack! But when I looked out, people were not running, but rather stood stock still in their places while electronic bells rung for a full minute. A moment of silence for the war dead. We did not need to understand Ukrainian to understand that. Then life continued, as it must.
Stanislaw Ulam did not experience war in Lwów because he was fortunate to have sailed for New York on August 10, 1939. He was spared the ghettos and the Holocaust, but his father, sister and her husband, and many of his friends and colleagues were murdered. He had left a lovely city, surrounded by great beauty and calm, and landed in Princeton and Harvard. His city had survived Soviet occupation, German occupation, and Soviet colonization but now is free, if under attack. Several days after our visit, a Russian missile hit an apartment complex in Lviv, killing a man and injuring several people.
Photos by C. Rzonca
We left by bus because there were no seats available on the train giving us a chance to see more of the countryside. The outskirts of Lviv looked like those of so many other cities, with large warehouses, transport hubs, and shopping malls interspersed with new, modern housing developments. On these narrow, poorly maintained roads, military trucks have the right of way and our bus pulled over several times to let empty tank carriers pass in the opposite direction. Our big bus squeezed through tiny villages lined with an eclectic mix of abandoned Soviet-era factories, modern buildings, and well-kept old cottages. We interpreted this as slow and steady improvement even in the countryside. The villages were neither grand nor wealthy, but they were not destitute, either. That is to say, they seemed to exude a sense, not only of defiance in the face of aggression, but more importantly, a stubborn but confident hope. Could the same be said for the entire country of Ukraine?
Chris Rzonca teaches writing as part of the Liberal Studies curriculum at New York University. He has written about the Polish writer Andrzej Bobkowski (Polish Review), theatrical performances and other theater-related events in Poland for European Stages (publ. in New York). His photographs were shown in solo exhibitions in Warsaw, Kazimierz Dolny, and in France. He is currently working on a film script about the life of Stanislaw Ulam.
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